


I'm Only Sleeping

by Lise



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: (I mean you know which way I would go if this did turn into an epic), Character Death, Depressing, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Grief/Mourning, Isolation, Loneliness, M/M, Rocks Fall Everyone Dies, Steve Angst, and also all of your friends, so uh yeah, that thing where you fall asleep for a few years at the time and keep losing years of your life, vague nebulous handwaving of previous events, what am I doing though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-17
Updated: 2014-02-17
Packaged: 2018-01-12 19:17:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1196409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lise/pseuds/Lise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve keeps missing years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm Only Sleeping

**Author's Note:**

> So I asked for sad prompts on my tumblr a while back and [mikkeneko](http://mikkeneko.tumblr.com) gave me "steve gets hit by an injury/disease/curse that causes him to keep falling into a coma like the one he was stuck in the ice he keeps waking up once a year or every few years until everybody in his life is dead except loki" and I went _oooooh_. 
> 
> In order to not give myself a new epic project, which was what this prompt really deserved, I did /vague handwave universe where Loki is no longer actively hostile, though not really on the side of the angels at all either. Because reasons. 
> 
> I like suffering, I guess.

Steve went for a run. 

He knew he should be with his team, should be talking to them about how to deal with this. How they were going to adjust. At least helping them - deal with the implications. But he couldn't - right now, he couldn't. 

He sat down after something like seven miles on a park bench somewhere, breathing hard and not quite sure where he was. He leaned over, bracing his elbows on his knees, and closed his eyes. 

"What are you doing?" 

Steve started, and sat up with a jerk, looking to his left. Loki was regarding him with a very slight frown. Steve scrubbed a hand over his face. 

"You startled me," he said, instead of answering. "And I could ask you the same thing." 

"There has been some...uproar." Loki shrugged. "Thor came sniffing about, asking some questions that were not quite vague enough. Have you contracted some mortal disease?" He sounded more curious than concerned. 

"No," Steve said, after a moment. "No, I haven't." 

"What is it, then?" Loki asked, head cocking to the side. Steve pushed himself to his feet. 

"None of your business," he said, a little curtly. "And I'd rather not talk about it." 

Loki's lips thinned and he looked almost offended, but he stood. "Fine then," he said, and vanished. Steve almost regretted chasing him away. He felt suddenly - very alone. 

_Five to seven years,_ the doctor had said.  _We can't predict how long you will have in between. It could be months, it could be years. There's no way of knowing._

_What's the good news,_ Steve had made himself ask, though he felt like he was choking. 

_Well,_ Ciacci had said.  _You're alive, aren't you?_

* * *

The first few times were - relatively easy. 

It wasn't like the ice - not the same violence, not the same vague dreams of cold. It was more peaceful than that - like falling asleep. Someone was always there when he woke up, to tell him how long it had been, what day it was, what year. The Avengers were usually right behind as soon as he was on his feet. It wasn't seventy years. Just five, or six, or once just four.  _Lingering aftereffects,_ the doctors called it. It was for his own safety. Whatever the curse he'd been hit with - apparently this was his body's defense. 

He lived the best he could, the times between. His friends tried to make it easy. Tony made videos to catch him up on current events. None of them acted like he was fragile, or damaged. 

It took him some time to notice the cracks. 

Tony stopped mentioning Pepper, and it was Clint who told him that they'd broken up. Lives changed.  _People_ changed. He didn't know their jokes anymore, and their banter felt strange and awkward, stilted, around him. 

They were moving, and he was holding still, or moving in fits and starts. 

They didn't want to leave him behind, but in return he was holding them back. 

* * *

He'd been awake for seven months when Loki turned up again, this time perched on the back of one of his couches. 

"You could have knocked," Steve said, after jumping.

"I could have," Loki agreed. "Where is it you vanish to?" He still had that more curious than concerned tone of voice. 

"What do you mean," Steve said flatly, playing dumb. Loki frowned. 

"Do not think I have failed to observe that you disappear for periods of time now and then, only to reappear, apparently without cause."

"Why does it matter to you?" Steve asked, perhaps a little rudely. 

"I am curious." 

Steve felt a sudden urge to tell him, without knowing why. Maybe because Loki probably wouldn't look at him with pity. Would probably just shrug and leave again without caring at all. He held it back, though. "Well, I guess you'll have to stay curious." 

Loki frowned. "I will find out, sooner or later." 

"Will you," Steve said, flatly. He set down the mug of coffee he was drinking. "I'd think you'd have more interesting things to do with your time." 

"Apparently not," Loki said blithely. 

Steve sighed, and stood up. He opened his mouth, and froze. That slight fuzziness was there, that warned him he was about to go. He fought it, suddenly angry.  _Not already, I haven't had long enough-_  Loki's eyebrows furrowed. 

"What is it?" he asked. Steve shook his head jerkily. 

"Nothing," he said through gritted teeth. "Get out of my apartment." 

"Why would I-" Loki started to say, sounding indignant, but the dark came up fast, and Steve lost the rest. 

* * *

He woke up again with the doctor on one side and, curiously enough, Loki on the other. Steve blinked at him, but Loki's expression was impossible to read. The doctor did not seem to notice that he was there, simply rattling off the date (six years, Steve noted dully) and the time and asking if he was all right. 

"Um," Steve said, a little disoriented by Loki's staring at him. "Yes, I'm fine." He glanced at the doctor. "Excuse me, but can you tell me if-"

Before he could get the words out to ask if he was the only one who could see a Norse god sitting in the room, he happened to glance back, and Loki was gone. Steve let the question die. Well, he supposed, Thor's brother had his answer, then. He hoped Loki was happy with it. 

* * *

In the end, it was Tony they lost first. 

To liver disease, Bruce told him, not quite meeting Steve's eyes. You were still...

Steve went to the gravesite though there was nothing buried there. At the back of his mind, he knew he'd known, somewhere, that this was going to happen. That he would start losing friends again. He hadn't wanted to think about the fact that he would likely sleep through half their deaths. 

He stood there for a long time, not sure what he was looking for the words to say. He'd been breathing for a century and some and he was still, physically, just barely thirty. 

Steve returned to the tower, but he could see it now, what he'd been ignoring out of fear. New lines around Natasha's mouth. A touch of grey around Clint's temples. Did Bruce move more slowly than he used to? Only Thor seemed definitively unchanged. 

Steve fled, terrified. He didn't want to do this. Not again. He'd thought it had been terrible to wake up with everyone he knew long gone, but this, he thought, might be worse. Waking up, and everyone but him aging, a little bit at a time. 

* * *

Clint and Natasha went together. That was good, Steve thought dully, when he was told. They would have wanted that. 

He'd missed the funeral by about a month. 

There were new groups of Avengers now. Spontaneously formed, most of them. The Young Avengers was one, a group of superpowered teenagers.

There was a monument to the original Avengers in Central Park. 

Steve went to look at it.

"It's a fine work," said a voice just behind him and to his left, and Steve tensed. "Though the details are a little off, if you asked me." 

He turned slowly, and looked at Loki, though he felt too tired to be as wary as he should be. "What do you want?" he asked ,flatly. 

Loki shrugged, a startlingly human gesture. "A good question. What do  _you_ want, Captain?" 

Steve looked away.  _I don't know._ He thought, sometimes, he wanted to die, normally, in a fight or of some mundane disease. But he knew SHIELD was having him watched, and he couldn't quite make himself give in that much. 

"You do not age," Loki observed. "During these spells of yours." 

Steve pressed his lips together. "No."

"Strange," Loki observed. He cocked his head to the side, looking up at the statue. "Would you consider this immortality, Captain?" 

"By  _this_ do you mean the statue, or my - 'condition,'" Steve said, a little sharp. Loki's laugh was nearly soundless. 

"Both, perhaps. Either." 

"I never wanted immortality," Steve said. "All I wanted was a chance to fight for what I believed in." 

"And you got what you wanted, didn't you?" Loki said, and when Steve looked at him with narrowed eyes he found that Loki wasn't looking back, his expression strange. "How curious, how the fates decide to grant our wishes." 

"What about you?" Steve challenged. "What did  _you_ want?"

Loki's eyes, Steve thought, were on the statue of Thor, its face. "Perhaps that's my secret," Loki said, after a few moments. "I have never known." 

Then he was gone.

* * *

Bruce Banner had been diagnosed with leukemia, the doctor told him when he woke up. It was currently in remission, after surgery, but the prospects were grim.

Nick Fury, she added, after a longer pause, was dead. Maria Hill was acting as Director of SHIELD.

Steve went to Thor. 

"How do you do it?" he asked. "How can you deal with - with watching your friends..."

Thor bowed his head. He spent less and less time on Earth these days, Steve heard, but he was always there when Steve was awake. "I do not know," Thor said, after a long silence. Jane, Steve knew, was growing old. Still going strong, but... "I mourn, every time." 

Steve shook his head. "What about your brother?" he asked, and the moment it was out of his mouth didn't know why he had said it. "Are you," he pushed on, nonetheless, and made a vague gesture.

"He speaks to me, sometimes," Thor said, after a long pause. "But never...we are still not what we once were. Perhaps, in time..."

Steve made himself laugh. "At least I know you'll be here," he said. "You'll probably outlive me, even with...all of this." 

* * *

Bruce died while he was still awake. He went quietly, in his sleep, the gamma radiation that had been his burden finally claiming his life. Steve, for the first time, was able to attend one of his friends funerals. 

It was enormous. The wake for the Hulk took up city blocks. Steve thought of Bruce as he'd always known him, quiet and retiring and shy of the spotlight, and wondered what he would have thought to see this. 

He and Thor stood shoulder to shoulder, and Steve did his best to give a eulogy - for Bruce Banner, not for the Hulk - without choking on tears. 

He saw Maria Hill, briefly, before she vanished into the crowd. 

Nobody sent them on missions anymore. For most of these people, Captain America was a memory. A symbol. 

For many, Steve thought as he watched the news, the fires burning, he might as well be a lie. 

* * *

It blurred. 

Waking, sleeping, all of it ran together. Thor was there, always, as the rest of the world moved and kept moving. Supervillains rose, attempted vast schemes, fell, died. Steve felt little connection to any of it, anymore. It was a world he hardly lived in. Other heroes had claimed the mantle, the duty, the challenge. 

Sometimes, oddly, he thought of Loki. Wondering where he was. If he was still alive. Thor spoke of him seldom, so Steve suspected he was out there somewhere, another relic of the First Avengers. 

* * *

He woke up, and there was no doctor at his side. Just Loki, regarding him with an unreadable expression on his face. 

"What time is it?" Steve asked, blurrily.

"How should I know?" 

Steve sat up, rubbing his eyes. There were no lights, he realized. He was sitting in an abandoned room. It was cold, dusty. He felt a chill down his spine. "What's happened," he asked.

"Your SHIELD has fallen," Loki said, his voice toneless. "When the Kree attacked. They left you here."

Steve felt muddled, confused. "The Kree?" 

"Another alien race," Loki supplied. His eyes gleamed strangely in the dark. Steve shook himself. 

"And why are you here," he asked -  _demanded._ "Was this your-"

"My doing? No." A slight tone, there, something sharp, almost shrill, but it was gone again in a moment. 

"Then why-"

"Thor is dead," Loki said. His voice quavered, just slightly, but it was ironed out a moment later. "Killed. I thought you should know, and no one else was here to tell you." 

Steve's heart stopped beating, for a moment. "Wait," he said. "Wait, that's not - that's not possible." 

"It is," Loki said. "And it has happened." He stood. "The door is open, if you wish to go out. The war is over."

Thor. The last piece of the world that he had known. Steve's eyes stung. Maybe he should just stay here, and wait until the dust covered him up, too. 

"What are you going to do?" he asked, as Loki turned his back, the question bursting from his lips in despair. Loki fell still. 

"I?" 

"Yes," Steve said. "What...what are you going to do?"

"Why does it matter?" 

"I want to know." 

Steve thought he saw Loki's shoulders shudder, and draw up, very slightly. His head bow. A moment later and he stood as straight as ever, though; perhaps it had been an illusion. A trick of the light. "I do not know." He started walking.

Steve's heart ached. He wanted to be done. He wanted so  _badly_ to be done, sometimes. But he couldn't quite - he'd never known how to lie down and die. 

He made himself stand up. Not quite the last piece, he thought. And Thor would want...would want...

"Loki," he said quietly, just that. 

Loki stopped. 


End file.
